From: Rick McCallister
Message: 51647
Date: 2008-01-20
> My 73yr-old memory banks have just kicked in...____________________________________________________________________________________
> When I was a child in the 1940s, out in the
> boondocks ~provinces of the US,
> where mentioning these things was a great taboo,
> along about 10-11 years of
> age I learned from schoolmates the terms "dyke",
> short form of "morphodite
> ~morphodike" as a generic for "homosexual" (these of
> course are guesses at
> the spelling-- they were strictly spoken forms).
> Where my chums would have
> learnt the term, I have no idea. With later
> learning, of course, this
> proved clearly to be a corruption of
> "hermaphrodite", the common euphemism
> for "homosexual" (For ex., I've encountered it many
> a time in 19th C. Dutch
> ethnologies dealing with Indonesian tribes). Thus it
> strikes me that trying
> to find some ancient proto-origin for the term may
> be an exercise in
> futility.
>
> I'm surprised no other American participant here has
> recalled this, but
> maybe you're all a bunch of youngsters (i.e. younger
> than me) ;-), and I
> wouldn't expect our European friends to be familiar
> with ancient American
> schoolboy slang. And likely over the last 60-plus
> years, and given the
> frightening sophistication about sexual matters
> among modern-day American
> kids, the source "morphodi(tk)e" simply fell into
> disuse somewhere along the
> way.
>
>
>